Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

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Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: February 4, 2010 [EBook #4517]
Last Updated: March 8, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, and David Widger

ETHAN FROME

By Edith Wharton

CONTENTS

ETHAN FROME

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

ETHAN FROME

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome

drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you
must have asked who he was.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking

figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were
easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a
lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so
stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from
Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on
his line.

“He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that's twenty-four years ago come next February,” Harmon threw out

between reminiscent pauses.

The “smash-up” it was—I gathered from the same informant—which, besides drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome's forehead,

had so shortened and warped his right side that it cost him a visible effort to take the few steps from his buggy to the post-office
window. He used to drive in from his farm every day at about noon, and as that was my own hour for fetching my mail I often passed
him in the porch or stood beside him while we waited on the motions of the distributing hand behind the grating. I noticed that, though
he came so punctually, he seldom received anything but a copy of the Bettsbridge Eagle, which he put without a glance into his sagging
pocket. At intervals, however, the post-master would hand him an envelope addressed to Mrs. Zenobia—or Mrs. Zeena—Frome,
and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left-hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the name of
his specific. These documents my neighbour would also pocket without a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their
number and variety, and would then turn away with a silent nod to the post-master.

Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien; but his taciturnity was respected and it

was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word. When this happened he would listen
quietly, his blue eyes on the speaker's face, and answer in so low a tone that his words never reached me; then he would climb stiffly
into his buggy, gather up the reins in his left hand and drive slowly away in the direction of his farm.

“It was a pretty bad smash-up?” I questioned Harmon, looking after Frome's retreating figure, and thinking how gallantly his lean

brown head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape.

“Wust kind,” my informant assented. “More'n enough to kill most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan'll likely touch a hundred.”
“Good God!” I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after climbing to his seat, had leaned over to assure himself of the security

of a wooden box—also with a druggist's label on it—which he had placed in the back of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably
looked when he thought himself alone. “That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!”

Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek. “Guess he's

been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.”

“Why didn't he?”
“Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn't ever anybody but Ethan. Fust his father—then his mother—then his

wife.”

“And then the smash-up?”
Harmon chuckled sardonically. “That's so. He had to stay then.”
“I see. And since then they've had to care for him?”
Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. “Oh, as to that: I guess it's always Ethan done the caring.”
Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his

facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the
nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent inferences: “Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters.”

Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle

and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as
Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for recreation.
But when winter shut down on Starkfield and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to
see what life there—or rather its negation—must have been in Ethan Frome's young manhood.

I had been sent up by my employers on a job connected with the big power-house at Corbury Junction, and a long-drawn

carpenters' strike had so delayed the work that I found myself anchored at Starkfield—the nearest habitable spot—for the best part of
the winter. I chafed at first, and then, under the hypnotising effect of routine, gradually began to find a grim satisfaction in the life.

During the early part of my stay I had been struck by the contrast between the vitality of the climate and the deadness of the
community. Day by day, after the December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down torrents of light and air on the white
landscape, which gave them back in an intenser glitter. One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must quicken the emotions
as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield. When I had
been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of
February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their
support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.
Twenty years earlier the means of resistance must have been far fewer, and the enemy in command of almost all the lines of access
between the beleaguered villages; and, considering these things, I felt the sinister force of Harmon's phrase: “Most of the smart ones
get away.” But if that were the case, how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the flight of a man like Ethan Frome?

During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middle-aged widow colloquially known as Mrs. Ned Hale. Mrs. Hale's father had been

the village lawyer of the previous generation, and “lawyer Varnum's house,” where my landlady still lived with her mother, was the
most considerable mansion in the village. It stood at one end of the main street, its classic portico and small-paned windows looking
down a flagged path between Norway spruces to the slim white steeple of the Congregational church. It was clear that the Varnum
fortunes were at the ebb, but the two women did what they could to preserve a decent dignity; and Mrs. Hale, in particular, had a
certain wan refinement not out of keeping with her pale old-fashioned house.

In the “best parlour,” with its black horse-hair and mahogany weakly illuminated by a gurgling Carcel lamp, I listened every evening

to another and more delicately shaded version of the Starkfield chronicle. It was not that Mrs. Ned Hale felt, or affected, any social
superiority to the people about her; it was only that the accident of a finer sensibility and a little more education had put just enough
distance between herself and her neighbours to enable her to judge them with detachment. She was not unwilling to exercise this
faculty, and I had great hopes of getting from her the missing facts of Ethan Frome's story, or rather such a key to his character as
should co-ordinate the facts I knew. Her mind was a store-house of innocuous anecdote and any question about her acquaintances
brought forth a volume of detail; but on the subject of Ethan Frome I found her unexpectedly reticent. There was no hint of disapproval
in her reserve; I merely felt in her an insurmountable reluctance to speak of him or his affairs, a low “Yes, I knew them both... it was
awful...” seeming to be the utmost concession that her distress could make to my curiosity.

So marked was the change in her manner, such depths of sad initiation did it imply, that, with some doubts as to my delicacy, I put

the case anew to my village oracle, Harmon Gow; but got for my pains only an uncomprehending grunt.

“Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of it, she was the first one to see 'em after they was picked up. It

happened right below lawyer Varnum's, down at the bend of the Corbury road, just round about the time that Ruth got engaged to
Ned Hale. The young folks was all friends, and I guess she just can't bear to talk about it. She's had troubles enough of her own.”

All the dwellers in Starkfield, as in more notable communities, had had troubles enough of their own to make them comparatively

indifferent to those of their neighbours; and though all conceded that Ethan Frome's had been beyond the common measure, no one
gave me an explanation of the look in his face which, as I persisted in thinking, neither poverty nor physical suffering could have put
there. Nevertheless, I might have contented myself with the story pieced together from these hints had it not been for the provocation
of Mrs. Hale's silence, and—a little later—for the accident of personal contact with the man.

On my arrival at Starkfield, Denis Eady, the rich Irish grocer, who was the proprietor of Starkfield's nearest approach to a livery

stable, had entered into an agreement to send me over daily to Corbury Flats, where I had to pick up my train for the Junction. But
about the middle of the winter Eady's horses fell ill of a local epidemic. The illness spread to the other Starkfield stables and for a day
or two I was put to it to find a means of transport. Then Harmon Gow suggested that Ethan Frome's bay was still on his legs and that
his owner might be glad to drive me over.

I stared at the suggestion. “Ethan Frome? But I've never even spoken to him. Why on earth should he put himself out for me?”
Harmon's answer surprised me still more. “I don't know as he would; but I know he wouldn't be sorry to earn a dollar.”
I had been told that Frome was poor, and that the saw-mill and the arid acres of his farm yielded scarcely enough to keep his

household through the winter; but I had not supposed him to be in such want as Harmon's words implied, and I expressed my wonder.

“Well, matters ain't gone any too well with him,” Harmon said. “When a man's been setting round like a hulk for twenty years or

more, seeing things that want doing, it eats inter him, and he loses his grit. That Frome farm was always 'bout as bare's a milkpan when
the cat's been round; and you know what one of them old water-mills is wuth nowadays. When Ethan could sweat over 'em both from
sunup to dark he kinder choked a living out of 'em; but his folks ate up most everything, even then, and I don't see how he makes out
now. Fust his father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts afore he died. Then his
mother got queer and dragged along for years as weak as a baby; and his wife Zeena, she's always been the greatest hand at doctoring
in the county. Sickness and trouble: that's what Ethan's had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping.”

The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back

his worn bearskin, made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he drove me over every morning to Corbury
Flats, and on my return in the afternoon met me again and carried me back through the icy night to Starkfield. The distance each way
was barely three miles, but the old bay's pace was slow, and even with firm snow under the runners we were nearly an hour on the
way. Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the
cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in
monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an
incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly
in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness
was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound
accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Only once or twice was the distance between us bridged for a moment; and the glimpses thus gained confirmed my desire to know

more. Once I happened to speak of an engineering job I had been on the previous year in Florida, and of the contrast between the
winter landscape about us and that in which I had found myself the year before; and to my surprise Frome said suddenly: “Yes: I was
down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under.”

He said no more, and I had to guess the rest from the inflection of his voice and his sharp relapse into silence.
Another day, on getting into my train at the Flats, I missed a volume of popular science—I think it was on some recent discoveries

in bio-chemistry—which I had carried with me to read on the way. I thought no more about it till I got into the sleigh again that evening,
and saw the book in Frome's hand.

“I found it after you were gone,” he said.
I put the volume into my pocket and we dropped back into our usual silence; but as we began to crawl up the long hill from

Corbury Flats to the Starkfield ridge I became aware in the dusk that he had turned his face to mine.

“There are things in that book that I didn't know the first word about,” he said.
I wondered less at his words than at the queer note of resentment in his voice. He was evidently surprised and slightly aggrieved at

his own ignorance.

“Does that sort of thing interest you?” I asked.
“It used to.”
“There are one or two rather new things in the book: there have been some big strides lately in that particular line of research.” I

waited a moment for an answer that did not come; then I said: “If you'd like to look the book through I'd be glad to leave it with you.”

He hesitated, and I had the impression that he felt himself about to yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then, “Thank you—I'll take it,”

he answered shortly.

I hoped that this incident might set up some more direct communication between us. Frome was so simple and straightforward that I

was sure his curiosity about the book was based on a genuine interest in its subject. Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his
condition made the contrast more poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs, and I hoped that the chance of giving
expression to the latter might at least unseal his lips. But something in his past history, or in his present way of living, had apparently
driven him too deeply into himself for any casual impulse to draw him back to his kind. At our next meeting he made no allusion to the
book, and our intercourse seemed fated to remain as negative and one-sided as if there had been no break in his reserve.

Frome had been driving me over to the Flats for about a week when one morning I looked out of my window into a thick snow-fall.

The height of the white waves massed against the garden-fence and along the wall of the church showed that the storm must have been
going on all night, and that the drifts were likely to be heavy in the open. I thought it probable that my train would be delayed; but I had
to be at the power-house for an hour or two that afternoon, and I decided, if Frome turned up, to push through to the Flats and wait
there till my train came in. I don't know why I put it in the conditional, however, for I never doubted that Frome would appear. He was
not the kind of man to be turned from his business by any commotion of the elements; and at the appointed hour his sleigh glided up
through the snow like a stage-apparition behind thickening veils of gauze.

I was getting to know him too well to express either wonder or gratitude at his keeping his appointment; but I exclaimed in surprise

as I saw him turn his horse in a direction opposite to that of the Corbury road.

“The railroad's blocked by a freight-train that got stuck in a drift below the Flats,” he explained, as we jogged off into the stinging

whiteness.

“But look here—where are you taking me, then?”
“Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way,” he answered, pointing up School House Hill with his whip.
“To the Junction—in this storm? Why, it's a good ten miles!”
“The bay'll do it if you give him time. You said you had some business there this afternoon. I'll see you get there.”
He said it so quietly that I could only answer: “You're doing me the biggest kind of a favour.”
“That's all right,” he rejoined.
Abreast of the schoolhouse the road forked, and we dipped down a lane to the left, between hemlock boughs bent inward to their

trunks by the weight of the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays, and knew that the solitary roof showing through bare
branches near the bottom of the hill was that of Frome's saw-mill. It looked exanimate enough, with its idle wheel looming above the
black stream dashed with yellow-white spume, and its cluster of sheds sagging under their white load. Frome did not even turn his
head as we drove by, and still in silence we began to mount the next slope. About a mile farther, on a road I had never travelled, we
came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like
animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the
fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape
lonelier.

“That's my place,” said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame elbow; and in the distress and oppression of the scene I did not

know what to answer. The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the house on the slope above us in all its plaintive
ugliness. The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint,
seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the ceasing of the snow.

“The house was bigger in my father's time: I had to take down the 'L,' a while back,” Frome continued, checking with a twitch of the

left rein the bay's evident intention of turning in through the broken-down gate.

I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was partly due to the loss of what is known in New England as

the “L”: that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-
house, with the wood-shed and cow-barn. Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image it presents of a life linked with the soil,

and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it
enables the dwellers in that harsh climate to get to their morning's work without facing the weather, it is certain that the “L” rather than
the house itself seems to be the centre, the actual hearth-stone of the New England farm. Perhaps this connection of ideas, which had
often occurred to me in my rambles about Starkfield, caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome's words, and to see in the diminished
dwelling the image of his own shrunken body.

“We're kinder side-tracked here now,” he added, “but there was considerable passing before the railroad was carried through to

the Flats.” He roused the lagging bay with another twitch; then, as if the mere sight of the house had let me too deeply into his
confidence for any farther pretence of reserve, he went on slowly: “I've always set down the worst of mother's trouble to that. When
she got the rheumatism so bad she couldn't move around she used to sit up there and watch the road by the hour; and one year, when
they was six months mending the Bettsbridge pike after the floods, and Harmon Gow had to bring his stage round this way, she picked
up so that she used to get down to the gate most days to see him. But after the trains begun running nobody ever come by here to
speak of, and mother never could get it through her head what had happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died.”

As we turned into the Corbury road the snow began to fall again, cutting off our last glimpse of the house; and Frome's silence fell

with it, letting down between us the old veil of reticence. This time the wind did not cease with the return of the snow. Instead, it sprang
up to a gale which now and then, from a tattered sky, flung pale sweeps of sunlight over a landscape chaotically tossed. But the bay
was as good as Frome's word, and we pushed on to the Junction through the wild white scene.

In the afternoon the storm held off, and the clearness in the west seemed to my inexperienced eye the pledge of a fair evening. I

finished my business as quickly as possible, and we set out for Starkfield with a good chance of getting there for supper. But at sunset
the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft
universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the
winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.

The small ray of Frome's lantern was soon lost in this smothering medium, in which even his sense of direction, and the bay's homing

instinct, finally ceased to serve us. Two or three times some ghostly landmark sprang up to warn us that we were astray, and then was
sucked back into the mist; and when we finally regained our road the old horse began to show signs of exhaustion. I felt myself to
blame for having accepted Frome's offer, and after a short discussion I persuaded him to let me get out of the sleigh and walk along
through the snow at the bay's side. In this way we struggled on for another mile or two, and at last reached a point where Frome,
peering into what seemed to me formless night, said: “That's my gate down yonder.”

The last stretch had been the hardest part of the way. The bitter cold and the heavy going had nearly knocked the wind out of me,

and I could feel the horse's side ticking like a clock under my hand.

“Look here, Frome,” I began, “there's no earthly use in your going any farther—” but he interrupted me: “Nor you neither. There's

been about enough of this for anybody.”

I understood that he was offering me a night's shelter at the farm, and without answering I turned into the gate at his side, and

followed him to the barn, where I helped him to unharness and bed down the tired horse. When this was done he unhooked the lantern
from the sleigh, stepped out again into the night, and called to me over his shoulder: “This way.”

Far off above us a square of light trembled through the screen of snow. Staggering along in Frome's wake I floundered toward it,

and in the darkness almost fell into one of the deep drifts against the front of the house. Frome scrambled up the slippery steps of the
porch, digging a way through the snow with his heavily booted foot. Then he lifted his lantern, found the latch, and led the way into the
house. I went after him into a low unlit passage, at the back of which a ladder-like staircase rose into obscurity. On our right a line of
light marked the door of the room which had sent its ray across the night; and behind the door I heard a woman's voice droning
querulously.

Frome stamped on the worn oil-cloth to shake the snow from his boots, and set down his lantern on a kitchen chair which was the

only piece of furniture in the hall. Then he opened the door.

“Come in,” he said; and as he spoke the droning voice grew still...
It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story.

I

The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and

Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked
gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far
across the endless undulations.

Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the deserted street, past the bank and Michael Eady's new brick store and

Lawyer Varnum's house with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the Varnum gate, where the road fell away toward
the Corbury valley, the church reared its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked toward it the upper
windows drew a black arcade along the side wall of the building, but from the lower openings, on the side where the ground sloped
steeply down to the Corbury road, the light shot its long bars, illuminating many fresh furrows in the track leading to the basement
door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, a line of sleighs with heavily blanketed horses.

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was

rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his
feet and the metallic dome overhead. “It's like being in an exhausted receiver,” he thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a
year's course at a technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics; and the
images supplied by that experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally different associations of thought in
which he had since been living. His father's death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but
though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings
behind the daily face of things.

As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by

his sharp tramp. At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the church. He stood there a moment, breathing
quickly, and looking up and down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of the Corbury road, below lawyer
Varnum's spruces, was the favourite coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings the church corner rang till late with the shouts
of the coasters; but to-night not a sled darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay on the village, and all its
waking life was gathered behind the church windows, from which strains of dance-music flowed with the broad bands of yellow light.

The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the

revealing rays from within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually approached the farther angle of the basement
wall. Thence, still hugging the shadow, he edged his way cautiously forward to the nearest window, holding back his straight spare
body and craning his neck till he got a glimpse of the room.

Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The metal reflectors of

the gas-jets sent crude waves of light against the whitewashed walls, and the iron flanks of the stove at the end of the hall looked as
though they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was thronged with girls and young men. Down the side wall facing the window
stood a row of kitchen chairs from which the older women had just risen. By this time the music had stopped, and the musicians—a
fiddler, and the young lady who played the harmonium on Sundays—were hastily refreshing themselves at one corner of the supper-
table which aligned its devastated pie-dishes and ice-cream saucers on the platform at the end of the hall. The guests were preparing to
leave, and the tide had already set toward the passage where coats and wraps were hung, when a young man with a sprightly foot and
a shock of black hair shot into the middle of the floor and clapped his hands. The signal took instant effect. The musicians hurried to
their instruments, the dancers—some already half-muffled for departure—fell into line down each side of the room, the older
spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young man, after diving about here and there in the throng, drew forth a girl who
had already wound a cherry-coloured “fascinator” about her head, and, leading her up to the end of the floor, whirled her down its
length to the bounding tune of a Virginia reel.

Frome's heart was beating fast. He had been straining for a glimpse of the dark head under the cherry-coloured scarf and it vexed

him that another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of the reel, who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced
well, and his partner caught his fire. As she passed down the line, her light figure swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing
swiftness, the scarf flew off her head and stood out behind her shoulders, and Frome, at each turn, caught sight of her laughing panting
lips, the cloud of dark hair about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points in a maze of flying lines.

The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep up with them, belaboured their instruments like jockeys lashing

their mounts on the home-stretch; yet it seemed to the young man at the window that the reel would never end. Now and then he
turned his eyes from the girl's face to that of her partner, which, in the exhilaration of the dance, had taken on a look of almost
impudent ownership. Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given
Starkfield its first notion of “smart” business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son
seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto
Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping. It was strange that the girl
did not seem aware of it: that she could lift her rapt face to her dancer's, and drop her hands into his, without appearing to feel the
offence of his look and touch.

Frome was in the habit of walking into Starkfield to fetch home his wife's cousin, Mattie Silver, on the rare evenings when some

chance of amusement drew her to the village. It was his wife who had suggested, when the girl came to live with them, that such
opportunities should be put in her way. Mattie Silver came from Stamford, and when she entered the Fromes' household to act as her
cousin Zeena's aid it was thought best, as she came without pay, not to let her feel too sharp a contrast between the life she had left
and the isolation of a Starkfield farm. But for this—as Frome sardonically reflected—it would hardly have occurred to Zeena to take
any thought for the girl's amusement.

When his wife first proposed that they should give Mattie an occasional evening out he had inwardly demurred at having to do the

extra two miles to the village and back after his hard day on the farm; but not long afterward he had reached the point of wishing that
Starkfield might give all its nights to revelry.

Mattie Silver had lived under his roof for a year, and from early morning till they met at supper he had frequent chances of seeing

her; but no moments in her company were comparable to those when, her arm in his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long
stride, they walked back through the night to the farm. He had taken to the girl from the first day, when he had driven over to the Flats
to meet her, and she had smiled and waved to him from the train, crying out, “You must be Ethan!” as she jumped down with her
bundles, while he reflected, looking over her slight person: “She don't look much on housework, but she ain't a fretter, anyhow.” But it
was not only that the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth. The girl was more
than the bright serviceable creature he had thought her. She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her
things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.

It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been

more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and

even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had
remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether any one else in the
world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that one other spirit had trembled
with the same touch of wonder: that at his side, living under his roof and eating his bread, was a creature to whom he could say: “That's
Orion down yonder; the big fellow to the right is Aldebaran, and the bunch of little ones—like bees swarming—they're the Pleiades...”
or whom he could hold entranced before a ledge of granite thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the ice
age, and the long dim stretches of succeeding time. The fact that admiration for his learning mingled with Mattie's wonder at what he
taught was not the least part of his pleasure. And there were other sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them
together with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or
the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to him once: “It looks just as if it was painted!” it seemed to
Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret soul....

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie

whirl down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was
never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which,
when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity,
he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out,
and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

The sight made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent fears. His wife had never shown any jealousy of Mattie, but of

late she had grumbled increasingly over the house-work and found oblique ways of attracting attention to the girl's inefficiency. Zeena
had always been what Starkfield called “sickly,” and Frome had to admit that, if she were as ailing as she believed, she needed the
help of a stronger arm than the one which lay so lightly in his during the night walks to the farm. Mattie had no natural turn for
housekeeping, and her training had done nothing to remedy the defect. She was quick to learn, but forgetful and dreamy, and not
disposed to take the matter seriously. Ethan had an idea that if she were to marry a man she was fond of the dormant instinct would
wake, and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the county; but domesticity in the abstract did not interest her. At first she was so
awkward that he could not help laughing at her; but she laughed with him and that made them better friends. He did his best to
supplement her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to light the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and neglecting the
mill for the farm that he might help her about the house during the day. He even crept down on Saturday nights to scrub the kitchen
floor after the women had gone to bed; and Zeena, one day, had surprised him at the churn and had turned away silently, with one of
her queer looks.

Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but more disquieting. One cold winter morning, as he dressed in the

dark, his candle flickering in the draught of the ill-fitting window, he had heard her speak from the bed behind him.

“The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for me,” she said in her flat whine.
He had supposed her to be asleep, and the sound of her voice had startled him, though she was given to abrupt explosions of

speech after long intervals of secretive silence.

He turned and looked at her where she lay indistinctly outlined under the dark calico quilt, her high-boned face taking a grayish tinge

from the whiteness of the pillow.

“Nobody to do for you?” he repeated.
“If you say you can't afford a hired girl when Mattie goes.”
Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped to catch the reflection of his stretched cheek in the blotched looking-

glass above the wash-stand.

“Why on earth should Mattie go?”
“Well, when she gets married, I mean,” his wife's drawl came from behind him.
“Oh, she'd never leave us as long as you needed her,” he returned, scraping hard at his chin.
“I wouldn't ever have it said that I stood in the way of a poor girl like Mattie marrying a smart fellow like Denis Eady,” Zeena

answered in a tone of plaintive self-effacement.

Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw the razor from ear to chin. His hand was steady, but the attitude

was an excuse for not making an immediate reply.

“And the doctor don't want I should be left without anybody,” Zeena continued. “He wanted I should speak to you about a girl he's

heard about, that might come—”

Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself with a laugh.
“Denis Eady! If that's all, I guess there's no such hurry to look round for a girl.”
“Well, I'd like to talk to you about it,” said Zeena obstinately.
He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste. “All right. But I haven't got the time now; I'm late as it is,” he returned, holding his

old silver turnip-watch to the candle.

Zeena, apparently accepting this as final, lay watching him in silence while he pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and jerked his

arms into his coat; but as he went toward the door she said, suddenly and incisively: “I guess you're always late, now you shave every
morning.”

That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations about Denis Eady. It was a fact that since Mattie Silver's coming he

had taken to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to be asleep when he left her side in the winter darkness, and he had
stupidly assumed that she would not notice any change in his appearance. Once or twice in the past he had been faintly disquieted by
Zenobia's way of letting things happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase, revealing that

she had all along taken her notes and drawn her inferences. Of late, however, there had been no room in his thoughts for such vague
apprehensions. Zeena herself, from an oppressive reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade. All his life was lived in the sight and
sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive of its being otherwise. But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw
Mattie spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded hints and menaces wove their cloud about his brain....

II

As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the

grotesquely muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a face flushed with food and dancing. The villagers, being
afoot, were the first to climb the slope to the main street, while the country neighbours packed themselves more slowly into the sleighs
under the shed.

“Ain't you riding, Mattie?” a woman's voice called back from the throng about the shed, and Ethan's heart gave a jump. From where

he stood he could not see the persons coming out of the hall till they had advanced a few steps beyond the wooden sides of the storm-
door; but through its cracks he heard a clear voice answer: “Mercy no! Not on such a night.”

She was there, then, close to him, only a thin board between. In another moment she would step forth into the night, and his eyes,

accustomed to the obscurity, would discern her as clearly as though she stood in daylight. A wave of shyness pulled him back into the
dark angle of the wall, and he stood there in silence instead of making his presence known to her. It had been one of the wonders of
their intercourse that from the first, she, the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing him by the contrast, had given him
something of her own ease and freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days, when he had tried to “jolly” the
Worcester girls at a picnic.

He hung back, and she came out alone and paused within a few yards of him. She was almost the last to leave the hall, and she

stood looking uncertainly about her as if wondering why he did not show himself. Then a man's figure approached, coming so close to
her that under their formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim outline.

“Gentleman friend gone back on you? Say, Matt, that's tough! No, I wouldn't be mean enough to tell the other girls. I ain't as low-

down as that.” (How Frome hated his cheap banter!) “But look at here, ain't it lucky I got the old man's cutter down there waiting for
us?”

Frome heard the girl's voice, gaily incredulous: “What on earth's your father's cutter doin' down there?”
“Why, waiting for me to take a ride. I got the roan colt too. I kinder knew I'd want to take a ride to-night,” Eady, in his triumph,

tried to put a sentimental note into his bragging voice.

The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her scarf irresolutely about her fingers. Not for the world would he

have made a sign to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.

“Hold on a minute while I unhitch the colt,” Denis called to her, springing toward the shed.
She stood perfectly still, looking after him, in an attitude of tranquil expectancy torturing to the hidden watcher. Frome noticed that

she no longer turned her head from side to side, as though peering through the night for another figure. She let Denis Eady lead out the
horse, climb into the cutter and fling back the bearskin to make room for her at his side; then, with a swift motion of flight, she turned
about and darted up the slope toward the front of the church.

“Good-bye! Hope you'll have a lovely ride!” she called back to him over her shoulder.
Denis laughed, and gave the horse a cut that brought him quickly abreast of her retreating figure.
“Come along! Get in quick! It's as slippery as thunder on this turn,” he cried, leaning over to reach out a hand to her.
She laughed back at him: “Good-night! I'm not getting in.”
By this time they had passed beyond Frome's earshot and he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes as they

continued to move along the crest of the slope above him. He saw Eady, after a moment, jump from the cutter and go toward the girl
with the reins over one arm. The other he tried to slip through hers; but she eluded him nimbly, and Frome's heart, which had swung
out over a black void, trembled back to safety. A moment later he heard the jingle of departing sleigh bells and discerned a figure
advancing alone toward the empty expanse of snow before the church.

In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she turned with a quick “Oh!”
“Think I'd forgotten you, Matt?” he asked with sheepish glee.
She answered seriously: “I thought maybe you couldn't come back for me.”
“Couldn't? What on earth could stop me?”
“I knew Zeena wasn't feeling any too good to-day.”
“Oh, she's in bed long ago.” He paused, a question struggling in him. “Then you meant to walk home all alone?”
“Oh, I ain't afraid!” she laughed.
They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and grey under the stars. He brought

his question out.

“If you thought I hadn't come, why didn't you ride back with Denis Eady?”
“Why, where were you? How did you know? I never saw you!”

Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw. Ethan had the sense of having done something arch and

ingenious. To prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in a growl of rapture: “Come along.”

He slipped an arm through hers, as Eady had done, and fancied it was faintly pressed against her side, but neither of them moved. It

was so dark under the spruces that he could barely see the shape of her head beside his shoulder. He longed to stoop his cheek and
rub it against her scarf. He would have liked to stand there with her all night in the blackness. She moved forward a step or two and
then paused again above the dip of the Corbury road. Its icy slope, scored by innumerable runners, looked like a mirror scratched by
travellers at an inn.

“There was a whole lot of them coasting before the moon set,” she said.
“Would you like to come in and coast with them some night?” he asked.
“Oh, would you, Ethan? It would be lovely!”
“We'll come to-morrow if there's a moon.”
She lingered, pressing closer to his side. “Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum came just as near running into the big elm at the bottom. We

were all sure they were killed.” Her shiver ran down his arm. “Wouldn't it have been too awful? They're so happy!”

“Oh, Ned ain't much at steering. I guess I can take you down all right!” he said disdainfully.
He was aware that he was “talking big,” like Denis Eady; but his reaction of joy had unsteadied him, and the inflection with which

she had said of the engaged couple “They're so happy!” made the words sound as if she had been thinking of herself and him.

“The elm is dangerous, though. It ought to be cut down,” she insisted.
“Would you be afraid of it, with me?”
“I told you I ain't the kind to be afraid” she tossed back, almost indifferently; and suddenly she began to walk on with a rapid step.
These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome. The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a

bird in the branches. The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a
fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone. Now he thought she understood him, and feared; now he was sure she did
not, and despaired. To-night the pressure of accumulated misgivings sent the scale drooping toward despair, and her indifference was
the more chilling after the flush of joy into which she had plunged him by dismissing Denis Eady. He mounted School House Hill at her
side and walked on in silence till they reached the lane leading to the saw-mill; then the need of some definite assurance grew too
strong for him.

“You'd have found me right off if you hadn't gone back to have that last reel with Denis,” he brought out awkwardly. He could not

pronounce the name without a stiffening of the muscles of his throat.

“Why, Ethan, how could I tell you were there?”
“I suppose what folks say is true,” he jerked out at her, instead of answering.
She s...